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2016 Alumni Notes Graduation Years 2009-10

2010

Saba Abuhay

Saba Abuhay standing next to an elephantSince graduating from Cal Poly I've lived in Los Angeles, Austin and most recently moved to Oakland. I work as an analyst in the staffing organization within People Operations at Google in the Bay Area. I've been fortunate to do a lot of traveling this year including spending time in South Africa (Johannesburg and Cape Town), Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls), London and Barbados. 

 

Mat Adams

I've been working as an analyst at LBN, a small digital marking agency in Los Angeles for a little over three and a half years. Over the last two years I've had the privilege of working everyday with fellow Cal Poly stats alum Max Klingmann. Other than work, I've been lucky enough to visit SLO twice this year, play in some table tennis tournaments and enjoy some newfound time with my wife now that she is done with occupational therapy grad school.

Danny Bragonier

After graduating I joined a small start-up as a marketing manager running Google Adwords campaigns. After 3 years there, I left to co-found www.betterhelp.com. We are an online counseling marketplace and platform. We connect people that need help with licensed professional counselors. As a two-man team, we bootstrapped for 18 months, slowly getting traction. We were acquired by Teladoc (NYSE:TDOC) in January of 2015. Today, we've signed up over 1.25 million people and are working with over 2,000 counselors. Building BetterHelp has been hugely rewarding and one of my favorite things is to hire statisticians straight out of college as analysts (hint: apply now!). On a personal note, I'm engaged and excited to get married next summer.

Aaron Hardiek

Aaron HardiekProfessionally, I have been working at as an actuarial consultant at PwC in Chicago for the past two years following stints at the Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau and Berkshire Hathaway in San Francisco. At PwC, I perform work on various engagements that range from valuating insurance liabilities, to helping companies develop better pricing and marketing strategies, to determining the appropriate level of reinsurance needed to maintain solvency goals. Currently, I am working on several large insurers' 9/30 loss reserve evaluations which will tie into the actuarial opinions that we perform at year-end. In terms of exam status, I have attained the associateship credentials and just finished taking exam eight last week.

In my personal life, most recently, I have been enjoying the Cubs recent World Series run! I was one of the many revelers out in the streets of Wrigleyville celebrating the win. My girlfriend, Dawn, pictured [above] with me, of nearly three and a half years and I tend to travel quite a bit. This year, we managed to make it to London, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Prague, Istanbul (2 weeks post coup!), and various U.S. cities. For New Year’s, we will be travelling to St. Thomas, and we have many exciting destinations planned for next year as well.

David Horn

Since the last update, I’ve been continuing to work at Disney as the head of technology for DCPI Labs. Last November, we launched DisneyLife in the UK (https://disneylife.com), a project three years in the building! It’s a subscription service for Disney films, books and music. Working on DisneyLife has taken me around the world, from London to Sydney, and it’s been an amazing opportunity. I’m still leveraging the knowledge I gained at the Stats Department. We are building lots of models, both to understand the performance of the product at scale, and also to build content recommendations for guests (given you watched Monsters Inc, the probability you will want to watch Toy Story is high).

In general, my statistics degree has made me very popular as topics like AI and machine learning are becoming hot topics within computer science, which quite often are fancy ways of saying “multiple linear regression.” Statistics is becoming more important than ever, and I’m really grateful for the education I received.

Personally, I’m living happily in San Francisco with my girlfriend, Gina (we met at Cal Poly!), and we just adopted a corgi mix puppy, Luna. I’ve been slowly teaching myself woodworking, and hoping to either buy or build a house in the next year!

Will Judson

I joined Macys.com as a marketing analyst in 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. I was analyzing how customers were getting to the site, and the customers experience while on the site. I have since been promoted to business intelligence and experimentation manager. I am leading a team to analyze any new features on the site as well as to A/B/n testing to statistically analyze if the new features are significantly affecting customers to convert higher and spend more. 

In my personal life, I was married in 2011 to my wife, Kellie (out of Cal Poly Mathematics), and we had a beautiful baby girl (Abbie) in April 2015. We are also expecting baby number two in April 2017.

Andy Kaplan

Since April 2012, I have been working as a biostatistician for the Department of Radiology at UCLA. My role is twofold: I analyze and manage data that comes through the department from clinical trials and provide statistical support to further the research of the department and the UCLA Medical Center. I was involved in managing a Phase III renal cell carcinoma trial last year that was later approved by the FDA. I have also been a member of the Westside Toastmasters in Santa Monica since summer 2015 and am now the vice president of education. Toastmasters is a group aimed at improving public speaking skills, which is especially important in statistical consulting.

Michelle Stratton (Shaffer)

Michelle Stratto on Mt. San GorgonioAfter graduating I stayed and got my teaching credential for mathematics through the Noyce Scholar program. I got a job teaching math in San Bernardino and taught in the district for five years. During that time, I married my husband, Greg Stratton, a fellow Cal Poly alumnus, got my master’s in applied mathematics at Claremont Graduate University, and am now looking into switching careers into data analysis or statistics. My time in SLO really helped inspire my inner hiker, and this year I proudly accomplished the "Six Pack of Peaks" Challenge - summiting six of the highest mountains in Southern California. 

Lauren Sweeney

In 2015 I decided to shake things up and applied for jobs outside of my home state of California. I landed at Amazon.com in sunny Seattle, Wash. Currently, I am managing the marketing business intelligence and analytics department for the digital video store. The skills I learned at Cal Poly, especially the ability to work with big data using R and SAS, have proved to be invaluable. 

In April I will be coming up on my two-year anniversary of living and working in Seattle. I am learning to embrace the rain and have taken up skiing to get through the winter months. I plan to attend the Cal Poly v. UW basketball game December 20th where I will cheer along with the many Cal Poly alumni that I have (re)connected with in Seattle. I plan trips home often to see friends, family and the California sun. I was thrilled to hear that this spring Alaska Airlines will be offering a nonstop flight from Seattle to SLO. I look forward to visiting soon. 

Andrew Zbin

I live in San Francisco and work at LinkedIn in Sales Strategy and Operations focused on growing existing business. I've been working there for almost four years now on a couple of different teams including Insights as well as Acquisition Sales Strategy and Operations. 

2009

Tyler Benz

After graduation I got a job with Northrop Grumman as an operations research analyst in Monterey, Calif. I maintained this role for a couple of years. I utilized SAS and SQL (as well as Excel) to analyze data and create reports from various military and government data. I then took some courses in business analysis (Villanova U) and project management (UC Santa Cruz) and moved into business analyst and project management roles where I developed tools and applications used by the military and federal government. I worked for NG for about six years. I then moved to Denver, Colo., and took a job at Comcast in a similar role — it's really a mix of project management, business analysis and data analysis. I've been here for about one and a half years, and it is going very well. I recently completed a three month in-class course in data science, which focused on building predictive models / machine learning using Python (among other tools). It was really great, and I'm hoping that I can carve a role out here that focuses more on statistics and machine learning, though we shall see. :)

All in all, things are great!

Mary Ellen DeHaven

To dive right into the statistics front, for the past year I have been the one data scientist for 24 Hour Fitness. It has been such a great fit to have a balance between fitness and statistics. The analytics department is relatively new so it has been an exciting to be part of “big” data decisions. It also has been pretty fun to explore quite a wide variety of analyses. One recent project has been a cluster analysis to identify key attributes of our members that utilize personal training. Another has been a multivariate regression analysis to identify demographic changes.

On a more personal level, I can’t seem to give up running and swimming. I placed second overall at the Santa Cruz aquathlon. It was a mile swim around a pier followed by a 5 mile run along the cliffs which was beautiful. The picture below is right after they announced the top three finishers. Other than that I have been attending weddings! I have been to eight wedding events in the past nine months, and there are still a few more to go.

Hunter Glanz

It's been an eventful two years here teaching in the Statistics Department at Cal Poly. I'm elated to continue teaching many of our courses in SAS and R and take special pride in being able to work more SQL into those courses. I've enjoyed accompanying our students to the UCLA DataFest competition, SAS Global Forum, and the Western Users of SAS Software conference. I also went on my very first scuba dive this past summer in Catalina. I'm looking forward to upcoming trips to Bali and Europe, along with conferences in Orlando and Baltimore.

Oliver Mead

Since the last update, I have changed position to supply chain manager from an analyst. I am still with Elevation Burger. We have 60 stores worldwide, and we are the largest organic grass-fed hamburger restaurant in the world.

Got married on July 2, 2016 to Carrie LaGrone from Atlanta, Ga. Live in Falls Church, Va. Spend my time volunteering with the youth group at my church in Northern Virginia and cooking lots of new recipes. I have a godson named Elliott Akira Valario who is the son of my best friends out here Sherwin and Bekah Valario.

Daniela Saldana (Sakamoto)

I’m currently still working at Amgen on designing clinical trials.  I’m working on some new ways to predict enrollment, cost, and feasibility of clinical trials.  Our team has cool innovative projects revolving optimization of clinical trials, especially around adaptive design.  In my personal life, I recently got a new Australian Cattle Dog puppy, who is a handful but very sweet.

Madeline Schroth-Glanz

When starting in the Statistics Department at Cal Poly in 2014, I was appointed introductory statistics courses for business majors which turned out to be a great way for me to hone my teaching skills as well as my own understanding of the subject matter. In the last year I have been given the opportunity to teach a different type of statistics class here at Cal Poly that is specifically designed for engineers. Although this experience has had its challenges, it has been extremely rewarding. Understanding how varying majors think about topics differently from others has helped sharpen my skills in teaching a variety of subjects. On a more personal note, I am very excited to have joined forces with a bioacoustician in Moss Landing studying marine mammal acoustics. I am hopeful that this research will flourish and become an integrated part of Cal Poly and the work that I do here.

Emily Shelburne (Tietjen)

Emily Shelburne with her husband, daughter, and newborn son NateIn December 2015, I completed my master's degree from CSU Stanislaus in education, school administration. In May, I was hired for a new teaching job in the town where I currently reside, gave birth to my second child — a son named Nate — and walked for my graduation — it was a busy month! I am currently teaching integrated math 2 and am going on my 5th year teaching AP statistics.

 

Aaron Benjamin Shev

I finally completed my Ph.D. in statistics at UC Davis in December! Immediately after defending my dissertation I moved from Davis to Sacramento, and I took a job in the UC Davis Medical Center in a group called the Violence Prevention Research Program. We do research on the causes, consequences and prevention of violence with a particular focus on firearm violence and on the connections between violence, substance abuse and mental illness. My title here is senior statistician and my work involves data cleaning; programming in R, SAS, and Java; data analysis and consulting. Other than that, life has been pretty [; \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi\sigma\^{2}}}e\^{-\frac{1}{2}\left(\frac{x - \mu}{\sigma}\right)\^{2}} ;].

 

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